As someone who writes about games, I tend to watch a lot of game trailers. So when upcoming horror game Frightence came across my desk, I figured I’d spend 53 seconds checking it out the trailer. It was seeming like a pretty standard first-person horror game, when all of a sudden I saw a very familiar hallway (at about the 0:36 mark).
Hold up. I know that hallway. Boy do I ever.
Fans of Hideo Kojima can probably recognize it right away, because this is the hallway from the 2014 demo P.T. In case you’re not familiar, P.T. was a mini horror game from an “unknown” studio that turned out to be something of a prank. Once people started completing the game (which had an extremely vague puzzle toward the end), it was revealed to be a tease for Kojima’s Silent Hills game (which was later cancelled). In fact, P.T. was just short for “playable teaser.”
Kojima shenanigans aside, the game takes place in a hallway that endlessly repeats. And it’s the exact same hallway shown in the Frightence trailer. Here’s the hallway from P.T. for comparison:
At first, I thought maybe the trailer just straight-up ripped off footage from P.T. gameplay, but then I compared the two and started spotting the changes.
In Frightence, the hallway is lit up more, for example, and it’s not super messy (the dresser at the end of the hallway is covered in trash in P.T.) Plus, the paintings are different, and the digital clock has red numbers instead of blue. The camera is also positioned lower in Frightence than in P.T. Clearly, then, this hallway was built in the game, so this isn’t just borrowed footage for the trailer.
But there are some unmistakable details, such as the wall color, the dark wood flooring, the little section cut out of the hallway where the clock sits, the narrow window, etc. That’s very clearly the same hallway.
There’s another shot of this hallway from around the corner, and this is where the differences really start to show:
In P.T., the area in the foreground would be the front entrance to the house; in Frightence, it’s instead a lounge area with a leather recliner and a TV. It makes me curious about whether that door leads to a creepy bathroom or something else…
One has to wonder if this was just a lazy shortcut on the hand of the developers — skipping the step of actually designing a unique hallway — or if it’s supposed to be a loving tribute to a masterwork of Hideo Kojima that was never completed. I genuinely don’t know which it is.
Considering P.T. was pulled from the PlayStation Store in 2015 and is no longer available to play, it is kind of neat to see that distinctive hallway again (even though it still haunts my nightmares to this day).
You can check out the Frightence release trailer below.
